Joan Smith has a considerable talent as a journalist who has just managed to tar all military personnel as rapists. I would implore Joan to consider this. A majority of her research was historically based and on armies that used the conscript system or indeed autocratic governments, that relied on poor ill disciplined soldiers who functioned 90% of the time on drugs (Sri Lanka, Rwanda etc).
However does that excuse the abuse? Of course not it just shows that you put men or women into any uniformity you will instantly run the risk of being socially moulded into an abuser.

I would suggest that Joan ponders these headlines:

Rape is part of the clergy culture
Rape is part of the reporters culture
Rape is part of the premiership footballers culture (super injunction pending!)

and i could go on, however whilst an important subject and should and raise awareness i wonder if the headline could have just been:

I recall reading a book about the invasion of France and the stastics of rapes commited by the Allied forces, the French came first with a good few thousand mainly commited by North African members of the Free French, the Americans second with roughly the same while the British di'nt even make double figures.........

What she doesn't get is that fear is a useful tool in a commanders' hands. When you're a particularly nasty piece of work without scrupules then using the nastier methods of instilling fear on your enemies opens up unthought of avenues. Things like rape; torture; poisoning drinking water and arson come to mind.
In most middle eastern cultures women are still thought of as property and their value is as easily tarnished as their virtue. So when you want to harm a family, then rape the women. To these people raping the girls and women is the same thing as burning crops; blowing up wells and killing the cows, only more fun!

Wholesale rape causes wholesale terror and harms many more than the women alone. If you're up to it.

Thing is. That journo in the first post wants to smear soldiers as rapists. She is clearly a leftie civvie because she doesn't see the difference between the pressed conscript armies used by dicators to suppress their own population and the 21st century Western armies that are sent in harms way to maintain human rights and protect NGO's to help in the dirtiest corners of our world.
Rape as a tool can only be used by certain kind of people in a certain kind of situation. The fact that it has happened a lot in history doesn't mean that anyone in uniform is potentially guilty. As a maths teacher once explained to me: However small the chance, once the number of experiments reaches infinity the probabality of the chance occuring reaches one. Conflict has a long history and women's emancipation has happened only in the last 100 years of 40.000 years or so of human history.

I think the leftie journo who posted this has lost perspective and has forgotten how safe her little corner in North-West Europe is compared to the 90% of the worlds' population who live in backwards cultures wrought with violence, ignorance and religion. Perhaps a guided tour of Uruzgan; Helmand; Basra; Siera Leone and Libya would do her good?

She is a stupid bint. Luckily she lives in a comfort zone where she can talk such shit. Greer is another silly bitch who wrote one book of note (The Female Eunuch) and has been living high on the hog of spouting a load of left wing drivel ever since.